Sickness - The Common Cold

Game Talk The Garage
21

[quote=“i2amroy, post:20, topic:2951”]Suffering withdrawal causes big health penalties (much like the real world). You are actually much less likely to get sick as a hobo if you work off your addiction in steps rather then just going straight cold turkey. Also eating/drinking healthy and taking some vitamins/flu shots can help avoid it.

In other words, you picked hobo, and you decided to go cold turkey, so it’s your own dang fault that you got sick. That’s what you get for taking all those extra points. :P[/quote]

Like my post says, my past 3 characters have had day 1 colds. Only the latest was a hobo. I figured the disadvantage to alcohol addiction would be the expected withdrawal, the delirium, etc., not getting the flu every single day. I’ve been wishing in royal jellies so my character can actually function, and I’ve went through 31 of them in a 24 hour period removing flus. Have you ever met someone that’s gotten a flu twice within a few months? Let alone 31 times in 24 hours.

Alcohol withdrawal commonly results in nausea and vomiting in real life, but if that’s what they’re trying to simulate, why not keep that as an effect of the withdrawal, rather than making a character addicted to alcohol be a walking flu? I know the game’s not the poster child of realism with it’s nether creatures and zombies, but it also labels itself as a survival game. The survival aspects should make sense. Catching a flu within hours of getting rid of one makes zero sense.

22

The only issue I can see is that you’re getting messages saying you’ve recovered even though your health is so poor that you’re going to catch another cold immediately. What’s happening is your health is in the crapper and you can’t recover from the cold, if you don’t take proper care of yourself, you most certainly can have a cold last an extremely long time, basically you never recovered from the first cold.
Royal Jelly doesn’t reset your health, it just removes the immediate disease. What you need to do to prevent colds is eat healthy stuff, including vitamins and healthy foods, and also a vaccine shot if you can find one. Also mouth protection helps prevent cold/flu. Even a bandana can make it less likely.

As has been said several times, the “cold” isn’t the “common cold”, it’s the “cataclysm cold”, it’s intentionally more virulent and faster acting than a regular cold. Also it spreads differently, it’s a pervasive airborne pathogen that your body can fight off if healthy.

23

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:22, topic:2951”]The only issue I can see is that you’re getting messages saying you’ve recovered even though your health is so poor that you’re going to catch another cold immediately. What’s happening is your health is in the crapper and you can’t recover from the cold, if you don’t take proper care of yourself, you most certainly can have a cold last an extremely long time, basically you never recovered from the first cold.
Royal Jelly doesn’t reset your health, it just removes the immediate disease. What you need to do to prevent colds is eat healthy stuff, including vitamins and healthy foods, and also a vaccine shot if you can find one. Also mouth protection helps prevent cold/flu. Even a bandana can make it less likely.


As has been said several times, the “cold” isn’t the “common cold”, it’s the “cataclysm cold”, it’s intentionally more virulent and faster acting than a regular cold. Also it spreads differently, it’s a pervasive airborne pathogen that your body can fight off if healthy.
[/quote]

If that also applies to influenza being the “Cataclysm Influenza”, then that at least has a logical basis. I still find it a huge problem that while eating cooked meat/clean water, wearing a filter mask, and chugging vitamins on a regular character still often enough results in day 1 flus, though my versions change every character so I have no idea what sort of changes have happened.

Either way, I find the current health system is a huge dampener on the entertainment value of the game. It reminds me of skill rust, except that has various settings you can choose. Until the health system gets reworked or some sort of options towards it, I see no solution but wishing in piles of royal jellies so the game can be played without spending hours in real time trying to keep a character with no skills or stockpile alive long enough to enjoy himself.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the work and effort being put into the game, but I feel this needs to be brought up. I don’t see the harm in a setting for ambient disease power.

EDIT: Wishing in the Disease Immune mutation works as well, just found that one in the list. Thanks for the response.

24

  1. Are you chugging vitamins? Eating more the 2-3 vitamins at a time has no effect at all, and if you are in good health eating more then 1 vitamin every 6 hours or so won’t have any real effect. (The maximum benefit from vitamins is one every ~14 hours, but that means that for part of that your health only is average. Thus taking more often then that wastes some of the vitamin’s potential while providing greater protection.

  2. Diseases are very weak already. Assuming a zero health stat (which is what all players tend towards unless they disturb it through their actions) the chance of you getting sick on the very first day is only 5.2%. In the first week it’s only 31.2% (and that is totally inclusive, meaning if you get sick at midnight it counts). With disease resistant those amounts drop to 3.9% and 24.4% respectively. And then even if you are infected only one in 6 of the times will it be the flu. That means that the chance for a disease resistant player who normally eats vitamins/healthy things the chance of getting the flu is around .6% in the first day and 4.4% in the first week. If you managed to get the flu on two characters like that in a row on the first day then I applaud you sir, since you have managed to draw the one in approximately 25,000 pairs of games where that will happen.

25

  1. Are you chugging vitamins? Eating more the 2-3 vitamins at a time has no effect at all, and if you are in good health eating more then 1 vitamin every 6 hours or so won’t have any real effect. (The maximum benefit from vitamins is one every ~14 hours, but that means that for part of that your health only is average. Thus taking more often then that wastes some of the vitamin’s potential while providing greater protection.

  2. Diseases are very weak already. Assuming a zero health stat (which is what all players tend towards unless they disturb it through their actions) the chance of you getting sick on the very first day is only 5.2%. In the first week it’s only 31.2% (and that is totally inclusive, meaning if you get sick at midnight it counts). With disease resistant those amounts drop to 3.9% and 24.4% respectively. And then even if you are infected only one in 6 of the times will it be the flu. That means that the chance for a disease resistant player who normally eats vitamins/healthy things the chance of getting the flu is around .6% in the first day and 4.4% in the first week. If you managed to get the flu on two characters like that in a row on the first day then I applaud you sir, since you have managed to draw the one in approximately 25,000 pairs of games where that will happen.[/quote]

I’m not concerned with whether you believe me or not, as I can only speak from my experiences, and the experiences of those I speak to who also play the game. If you have a problem with the idea of an option to change how ambient diseases work, I honestly don’t know what to tell you, as that wouldn’t make any sense, or affect you in any way.

26

My hobo had a healthy diet of meat and vegetables, as well as clean nice water, occasional vitamins and vaccine shots- and I still got colds every second. Over 100 per hour.

27

What’s funny about this discussion to me is that most of the homeless folks I’ve known/met in real life have been surprisingly healthy.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a hobo with a cold in the real world before.

28

Well some of them were drunk when I met them, but not sick. Hmmmmmm…

29

As stated, that’s because your hobo starts out with severe alchohol addiction, losing on average two points of health a minute while in withdrawal. Vitamins help a little (10 pts), vaccine shots help a lot (100 pts), but the health loss from alchohol withdrawal easily dwarfs the benefit of those while it’s happening. Water doesn’t help, neither does meat. Pretty much any and all drugs also have negative impact on health, so if you’re taking those it’s compounding the problem. So you will pretty much perpetually have a cold or the flu. If this bothers you, don’t use that profession.

I’ll take a look at a severely unhealthy character (probably a hobo), re: reinfection multiple times a minute, because you only have one chance to get sick every 30 minutes, at the same time as pain ticks up and down, so IMMEDIATE reinfection shouldn’t be happening.

30

I’ve been cold turkey for over a month on my character, withdrawal has long stopped.

31

How the HELL am I supposed to know that if you don’t tell me?
Anyway, I can’t reproduce disease immunity as you reported, and I can’t see any possible way that you can get a cold multiple times in a minute as you’ve stated, though I’m going to try and reporduce anyway.

32

Hello, I seem to be able to reproduce the OP’s problem, much to my chagrin.

My current hobo (with 17 Strength and Disease Resistance) has not experienced any alcohol withdrawal for a couple of weeks now and he still has constant common colds. The “you feel like you have a cold coming on…” message literally pops up after the coughing messages, which I’m guessing translates to my cold subsiding before suddenly coming back with a vengeance pretty much seconds after. How does that make sense?

I decided to follow the tips here and lived a pretty healthy life in those weeks, literally spending every single day sleeping with a proper intake of cold medicine, vitamins, food and water in-between. Just recently, I noticed my common cold disappearing… and in its place was influenza. At that point I pretty much gave up.

The common cold was a minor problem in the previous versions, and was relatively easy to prevent/get rid of. Not sure why it’s becoming so persistent now. Even if hobos aren’t the healthiest of specimens, this is just plain absurd, especially considering that my hobo is pretty beefy and disease resistant to boot.

EDIT: Oh, this is with 0.8 Romero, by the way.
If it helps, this was the setup I used for my character (I maximised the points and turned off skill rust to get an easier playthrough).

STR: 17, DEX: 15, INT: 16, PER: 11
+ve traits: Animal Empathy, Disease Resistant, Fast Healer, Gourmand, Light Eater, Night Vision, Packmule, Pain Resistant, Poison Resistant, Quick, Robust Genetics
-ve traits: Far-Sighted, Forgetful, Glass Jaw, Heavy Sleeper, Hoarder, Jittery, Near-Sighted, Poor Hearing, Trigger Happy, Truth Teller, Ugly
Profession: Hobo

I would send you the save file, but considering world gen files and stuff I have no idea how to do that properly or which files exactly to send.

33

I’ll check this out also, since all I can achieve lately with playing CataDDA is a sharp built character that whacks everyone, or the misfortunate one that dies miserably in the first couple of hours.

34

My hobo made it to day 9 so far. Still hasn’t been able to kick the addiction. From previous posts that means I have had nine days of health penalties, and since its the beginning of the game, it has probably been negative for a very long time. I do not know how to look at the code, and definitely not 1oo% of the mechanics. But I’m suspicious that hobos rack up some mad negative health, and its very difficult for them to ever recover.

35

I’ve been playing a hobo run on 0.8. He broke his alcohol addiction on day 4, and that’s with the “addictive personality” penalty (seemed fitting from a role playing perspective). I had ~8 or so drinks on the first day to give me enough time to collect some decent clothing and pack myself out with food (cans of beer are actually great early-game food for an alcoholic). 1:30pm on the first day was my last drink. I wore whatever mouth protection I could find after reading this thread. Ended up catching a cold but never the flu. I also managed to find some vitamins in the first couple of days and took a couple every time I woke up. I looked in the code, and to drop your addiction level at first, you need to stay sober for somewhere around 10-12 hours. If you take a drink before that, you negate any progress. I went cold turkey, so it didn’t really matter.

Since you don’t have alcohol cravings while sleeping, I would always try to either craft, read, or practice fighting as soon as I woke up while my focus was high. Since I slept so much, my HP kept refilling, so I could afford to take a little damage while fighting. Withdrawal affected my stats, but not my speed, so I could still melee pretty well. Once the alcohol cravings bombed out my focus, I would go back and try to sleep more.

Anyway, filter mask + vitamins does indeed prevent illnesses pretty well while recovering from addiction. The cold had very little affect since I wanted to take Nyquil anyway to sleep. I know the theme of this thread is that hobo should be made easier, but with the right strategy in place it seems too easy already. My last run took 8 days to go sober, and this one only took 4, and after that, I have the rest of the game to enjoy my 4 free stat points.

By the way, I used those 4 points to boost strength by +1 and then get the krav maga fighting style. I guess that means my character is an Israeli who moved to New England after he served his 2 years in the military and then lost everything… not sure how else a hobo would know krav maga.

36

Looking at the health code again, it looks like health goes MASSIVELY negative during the withdrawal process, and takes a very very long time to recover. Specifically, for the duration of your withdrawal, you’re losing about one point of health a minute, and only regaining it at a rate of one point every thirty minutes afterwards, so it’ll take about 30x the time you spent in withdrawal to fully recover your health if you don’t do anything specific. Anything specific being vitamins, vaccine, and healthy food to a lesser extent.

There is one bizarre thing happening, which is that the addiction timer only runs when you’re awake. I think this is to prevent addiction effects from disturbing your sleep, but it really doesn’t make sense to just stop the clock when you’re asleep. I think for that part I’ll have the addiction clock run, but suppress most of the effects like craving messages when you’re asleep.

In fact I’m seriously considering removing the craving promt entirely, it doesn’t really add anything, and you aren’t in danger of dying if you ignore it or anything, so it’s just a hassle.

That still doesn’t explain people reporting catching and recovering from the cold/flu multiple times a minute, which is what concerns me, because that shouldn’t be possible, maybe I’ll have time to test tonight.

37

Yes please. The prompts tend to get in the way far too much.

Thanks for your hard work!

38

If wishing in royal jelly and chugging vitamins doesn’t work, I’d like to know if taking several vaccine shots helps, they’re far more effective than vitamins and would help determine if it’s a negative health value or something weird.

Would test it myself, but my characters rarely ever get sick, but I usually go unemployed or backpacker so I haven’t had to deal with withdrawal (yet).

39

Taking a bunch of vaccine shots should wipe out the health deficit really fast, it gives you a very large boost.

40

Sorry if this is a “solved issue,” but from what I can see, all of the people mentioning they had this problem took the “Disease Resistant” trait. Has anybody taken that trait who did not have a constant cycle of colds?